You can configure a network interface from the command line using the networking utilities. You configure your network client hosts with the command line by using commands to change your current settings or by editing a number of system files.

Configuring DHCP address for your network card

If you want to configure DHCP address you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces and you need to enter the following lines replace eth0 with your network interface card

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

# The primary network interface – use DHCP to find our address
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Configuring Static IP address for your network card

If you want to configure Static IP address you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces and you need to enter the following lines replace eth0 with your network interface card

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.3.90
gateway 192.168.3.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.3.0
broadcast 192.168.3.255

After entering all the details you need to restart networking services using the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Setting up Second IP address or Virtual IP address in Ubuntu

If you are a server system administrator or normal user some time you need to assign a second ipaddress to your Ubuntu machine.For this you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and you need to add the following syntax.Below one is the only example you need to chnage according to your ip address settings

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
address 192.168.1.60
netmask 255.255.255.0
network x.x.x.x
broadcast x.x.x.x
gateway x.x.x.x

You need to enter all the details like address,netmask,network,broadcast and gateways values after entering all the values save this file and you need to restart networking services in debian using the following command to take effect of our new ipaddress.

After entering all the details you need to restart networking services using the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Setting your ubuntu stytem hostname

Setting up your hostname upon a ubuntu installation is very straightforward. You can directly query, or set, the hostname with the hostname command.

As an user you can see your current hostname with

sudo /bin/hostname

Example

To set the hostname directly you can become root and run

sudo /bin/hostname newname

When your system boots it will automatically read the hostname from the file /etc/hostname

If you want to know more about how to setup host name check here

Setting up DNS

When it comes to DNS setup Ubuntu doesn’t differ from other distributions. You can add hostname and IP addresses to the file /etc/hosts for static lookups.

To cause your machine to consult with a particular server for name lookups you simply add their addresses to /etc/resolv.conf.

For example a machine which should perform lookups from the DNS server at IP address 192.168.3.2 would have a resolv.conf file looking like this

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

enter the following details

search test.com
nameserver 192.168.3.2

Network Troubleshooting Tips

Networking is sometimes considered to be complex, and hard to troubleshoot and manage. However, Linux provides you with Some tools to figure out exactly what’s going wrong on your network, and how to fix it.Here we are going see some tools and how to check the network connectivity.

Ping

Ping is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. Ping works by sending ICMP “echo request” packets to the target host and listening for ICMP “echo response” replies (sometimes dubbed “Pong!” as an analog from the Ping Pong table tennis sport.) Using interval timing and response rate, ping estimates the round-trip time (generally in milliseconds although the unit is often omitted) and packet loss (if any) rate between hosts.

This is very basic and powerful tool to check Internet connection

Example

ping -c 4 google.com

-c option is used to pass how many packets you’re sending

If everything working file you should get reply looks like below

Pinging www.l.google.com [64.233.183.103] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 64.233.183.103: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=244
Reply from 64.233.183.103: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=244
Reply from 64.233.183.103: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=244
Reply from 64.233.183.103: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=244

Ping statistics for 64.233.183.103:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 12ms, Average = 12ms

Traceroute

traceroute is a computer network tool used to determine the route taken by packets across an IP network. An IPv6 variant, traceroute6, is also widely available.Very useful to trace IP packets.

Example

traceroute google.com

ifconfig

The Unix command ifconfig can function as a tool to configure a network interface for TCP/IP from the command line interface (CLI).This is another easy tool to see if your interface is actually loading correctly.

Example

ifconfig

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0A:E6:C6:07:85
inet addr:132.18.0.16 Bcast:132.18.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20a:e6ff:fec6:785/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:18458 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:8982 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:4015093 (3.8 MiB) TX bytes:1449812 (1.3 MiB)
Interrupt:10 Base address:0xd400

Route

This is very useful to check routing config

Example

route -n

Netstat

If you want to see Routing Tables,all open ports,all listen ports

netstat -nr

-n means return numeric output (ie, IP address instead of hostname)

-r means print the routing table

find all open ports

netstat -a

find listening ports

netstat -l

http://www.debianadmin.com/ubuntu-networking-for-basic-and-advanced-users.html

Here’s another tools that, is useful. mtr. mtr can be seen as a combination of ping and traceroute. When started it runs as a ncurses program. And what make it interesting is that, it shows the result, live. To me it’s interesting. There is 2 version in the ubuntu repository, one is mtr, another is mtr-tiny. The version I use, is mtr-tiny, which do not have x11 support. to install it on ubuntu, is a matter of
sudo apt-get install mtr or sudo apt-get install mtr-tiny

To run in is a matter of

mtr destination(could be address or URL)

or to leave ncurses, useful if you want to redirect the output to a file.

mtr -r destination

or to run on certain cycle

mtr -c 10 destination

or you can combine it

mtr -c 10 -r destination

to run it, type

gkrellm &

and you’ll get several info about your computer in real time.

Gkrellm supports themes, so the app can have several appearances. I always use the “invisible” theme, which is a transparent theme, so you can see the background. Very cool. To install a new theme (Ubuntu) go to

http://www.muhri.net/gkrellm/

and download the theme you like. Most of the themes come gzipped. Once you download the theme to your home directory, ungzipp it and move the whole directory to ~/.gkrellm2/themes.